extremely mediocre

Rating: 5/10 (14 December 2005)

I didn't expect much from this movie, and I wasn't disappointed. It's another brainless action movie from Michael Bay. Like his others, leave your brain at the door.
The story is rather unoriginal, feeling mostly like the book Brave New World, a bit like Gattacca, Total Recall, Minority Report, bits of the Matrix, and other parts of movies glommed together, especially with some of the visual imagery. One really distracting thing is how Bay shot this movie. His television commercial and music video backgrounds really bear out here and don't serve the style of the movie well at all. Lots of quick cuts, pans, and shots from far away, rotations of landscapes... lots of scenes where the viewer isn't given more than 1 or 2 seconds on each cut, making it feel like MTV. This is fine for a Subaru SUV commercial, but not for this movie.
Some really stupid and obviously out of place technology here too. Most of the world looks exactly like today (2005), except for the hover trains and the Star Wars landspeeder. (Maybe McGregor made a deal with George Lucas).. hover trains that float stories above the ground, like in The Fifth Element, yet all the other cars drive on the ground.. The future doesn't look very futuristic at all.
Another annoying thing is the really obvious Microsoft product placements! In one of the early scenes, there's a plug for the XBOX (yet in 2050, Microsoft hasn't made an XBOX 5.. it's just the normal XBOX)... later, we get an MSN butterfly logo right in our faces. I don't know about you, but I find product placements extremely distracting and they cheapen any movie, forcing me to think about the product than the story, taking me right out of the experience.
McGregor's performance is weak and his American accent is horrid. Sean Bean is great as usual. Djimon Hounsou I liked and would've like to see more of. All in all, a terribly incohesive movie with huge gaping holes. A lot of the exposition is simply dummied down dialogue that flat out explains things to you. It assumes you're an idiot. ("this is a $500,000 car"... duh as if I couldn't draw that inference myself). Good if you want to turn off your brain, otherwise, watch any of the other movies this one tries to imitate.